The House That Rolled Down the County Road

The pantry door

The night before the move, Jake and I took the kids over to the house one last time to check that everything was tied down.

Arnie’s crew had already been under it for two days. The house was up on cribbing, sitting on two long steel beams, three feet higher than it was supposed to be. We had to climb in the back door on a step stool.

It was strange inside. Empty and echoing, the way it was the October Hailey was two. Our footsteps sounded too loud.

I was checking the cupboards in the kitchen when I realized Cole was not behind me.

I found him standing in the pantry doorway with his flashlight pointed up at the frame.

He is nine. He is a tough little boy who plays flag football and catches frogs in the stock tank, and he does not cry much anymore. He was crying.

“Cole? Baby, what’s wrong?”

He would not look at me. He just kept his flashlight pointed up at the door frame.

Every birthday since Hailey was two, we had stood the kids against that pantry door frame and marked their height in pencil, with the date beside it. Hailey’s marks went up the left side. Cole’s went up the right. Jake’s handwriting on some. Mine on others.

There was one mark at the very bottom, barely a foot off the floor, that said “Cole, 1st birthday, wouldn’t stand still.” Ruthann had written that one. It was her handwriting, slanted and careful.

“Do we have to leave them?” Cole asked. His voice was very small. “Grandpa’s going to keep the marks, isn’t he? Because they’re on his ground.”

That was when I understood how much my kids had heard that summer, no matter how quiet we tried to be.

I knelt down on the linoleum and put my arms around him.

“No, baby,” I said. “They’re part of the house. They’re nailed right into it. Wherever this house goes, they go too.”

Hailey had come up behind us. She is twelve and does not let me hug her in public anymore. She sat down on the floor beside us anyway and leaned her head on my shoulder.

“Can I write tonight’s date?” she asked. “So we know it’s the night before?”

Jake got a pencil out of his shirt pocket. Hailey wrote the date at the top of the frame, high up where nobody had ever been tall enough to reach, and under it she wrote: “The night before we took our house home.”